Freeport: City of Adventure

Here she be, the ship no one except for two people in whole of Golarion have ever heard of. She sags with rot and is cracked with age as though she was built during the Age of the Azlanti, but here she sits upon a mossy hill, The Narwhale.
While the crew without a ship is grateful to have found a ship, it is currently moored in an impossible berth. There is no body of water that can carry this vessel nearby, and the water that there is seems to be poisoned by a strange scythe planted in the running stream of blackened, “fresh” water like some sort of macabre water-marker.
Furthermore, the place seems to be crawling with undead and irate lizardfolk whose water supply this scythe seems to be poisoning to make them thirst more after taking a drink. If the scythe is the source of the infestation, it must be removed and yet according to Othollo it emanates a powerful negative energy aura meaning any who touch it would be sucked of their soul (negative levels). He insists that whoever planted this scythe must be found and eliminated since they are a “heart of evil that beats only foul ichor”.
The source is easy enough for the Paladin to follow, but it leads into a deep bog that will no doubt be blighted and filled with deadly gasses and desperate beasts.

The Narwhal!Sa’ed runs his fingers against the hull. The feeling of the wood stirs memories of comrades that are no longer here. Calamity, Tibbedeaux and Billy Boom come to mind. The slaves we freed. Freeing slaves and finding lost artifacts are what we seem to do. Now we have two ships.. Pretty soon we will have a antislave armada. Now we need to recruit some crew. I wonder if Tiburon still has those contracts. Make sail full speed ahead!

Eighty years ago, slavers devised a way to keep the trade of sentient beings alive and well, even in the current climate. They hid a sugar cane plantation on one of the smaller islands to the West of A’Val. There are just under a hundred slaves on this plantation used for working the fields and serving the army that runs this place. There are two other such slave dens, but Slashrend is the one that had the most intel gathered from it.
It is not known who rules the slave trade, only that they rule with an iron fist. But, that fist has gotten lax in the last decade and has allowed a sort of resistance to assemble. Rallied by a single hero, this resistance has managed to become a thorn in the slavers’ side, passing information that leads to pirates attacking the slave transports before they arrive and freeing incoming “shipments” of people.
There is a standing port that receives ships coming in under the cover of dark, and even uses a lighthouse with a beacon that cannot be seen without special lenses (It was actually this lighthouse and the tinkering of a gnomish inventor that led to the discovery of the island). The army was some 30 or 40 strong, but the real strength is in the demonic minions that swarm the island and seem to spawn from a deep cave that is known as the Pitched Throat (the crew later learned from the slaves).
There are some in Freeport who have been making sure the identity of this hero remains a secret, and have even used misinformation to make the slavers think it is an outside group responsible for the information leaks. The information has been confined to an extremely small group of people, because it is well known that the slavers have deep pockets and spend large portions of that wealth gaining influence. The only reason the crew was called in to do this is because they had the reputation of freeing themselves from the shackles of slavery.
The group was taken aboard the 004-GCSAV, a Gnome nautilus crewed by the tinker group that discovered the island (A private faction called the Subnauticants). With the help of breathing bottles and underwater tube cannons, the crew was inserted at the Southernmost part of the island where they had to scale a cliff in the middle of the night to find the hidden base nicknamed the ‘Aerie’ where they would make base.
The main objective was to rescue every single last slave on Slashrend island, steal the largest ship and sail to the waiting navy. The time line is from dusk until dawn. In that time, the group must somehow scuttle two of the three ships at the dock, free the slaves and get out before the army has a chance to gather and shoot everyone involved. Since it is night time, the hardest obstacle will be the demons patrolling the dark shores.
Even though there has been much intel gathered, it is relatively very little information about the island because it is so heavily guarded and letting too much information slip would have given away their spy. The group met the leader of the resistance who only went by the moniker, “Liberator” (After being free, he drops the mantle of Liberator and is just Ade’). While the Aerie was obfuscated from augury, strange demonic serpents, called Vermlek, infested two slaves and opened their faces like a horrific gore-flower.
The crew learned that the commander of the army was a heinous individual named Gordius Xeritoth. He is a powerful bloodmage, who the group was warned, to not fight directly. He is the reason there was artillery waiting to bombard Slashrend. It is known he has made covenants with Devils in order to increase his power. In return he feeds their legion a bounty of innocent slave souls.
The group left the Aerie and almost immediately were set upon by a Hellcat that tore into poor Tiburon. Tiburon was left with Bexley in the Aerie while the rest of the crew continued the mission. There was no turning back. They decided to go after one of the Overseers that had a key to release the slaves from their shackles. He was an expert hand-to-hand combatant despite (or because of) the fact that he was sloshing drunk. He also had two animated statues of Lamashtu fighting with him. In the end, he also had a slave collar, one that attempted to heal him of his grievous wounds; instead he impaled himself further on the sword that dealt him his final blow.
With key in hand, the crew freed the slaves and attempted to run to the ships in dock. Unfortunately, they were sunk and the rest of the island had gone eerily quieted except for harpsichord music playing from the main estate. They tried to leave by the Aerie, but they found that Tiburon had been kidnapped and an illusion had been left in his place.
They entered the mansion to retrieve their fellow crew member and had to navigate a maze of illusions and doors rigged with magical traps. They finally found Tiburon in a ballroom filled with banquet tables laden with gourmet prepared food all meat from people. At the head of the table was Commander Gordius Xeritoth. Here he intimated that he acquired a copy of the flare that the crew was given in order to signal the fleet that it was time to bombard the island. The flare is set off early, driving the crew and the slaves into the Pitched Throat. Here, they found a strange warren of tools more than likely used for demonic rituals, and also they found a man strapped to a wheel of pain. He was freed, but his language was unknown and he did not seem to understand common so he couldn’t tell the crew who he was.
More later….

The adventure log is where you list the sessions and adventures your party has been on, but for now, we suggest doing a very light “story so far” post. Just give a brief overview of what the party has done up to this point. After each future session, create a new post detailing that night’s adventures.

One final tip: Don’t stress about making your Obsidian Portal campaign look perfect. Instead, just make it work for you and your group. If everyone is having fun, then you’re using Obsidian Portal exactly as it was designed, even if your adventure log isn’t always up to date or your characters don’t all have portrait pictures.